Introduction

Researching North Korean refugees raises numerous methodological questions due to their acute vulnerabilities and the extreme conditions they face. Fundamentally, it challenges the ontological and epistemological approaches of positivism. The contestation over what is considered to be ‘truthful’ and ‘valid’ data in association with North Korean defectors’ stories is an indication of such a condition. In light of these concerns, in this chapter I discuss methodological considerations in depth, focusing in particular on the challenges of studying North Korean women defectors and their human rights issues.

I start with a discussion on phenomenology, which is a foundational philosophical underpinning of my research, especially hermeneutic (or interpretive) phenomenology. Next, the discussion progresses into life history in connection with phenomenology. After establishing the philosophical foundations and method, I examine access to and recruitment of the participants during different phases of the research. In the ensuing section, I present the feminist approach that I take to this research in order to centre the voices of the participants, while reducing the distance between researcher and participant. Additionally, I discuss some of the challenges that I experienced as a researcher of South Korean heritage researching North Korean women defectors, applying critical reflection. This is followed by an exploration of the social construction of truth and validity in the final part of the chapter.

Phenomenological understanding

This study takes a phenomenological approach to exploring the life stories of North Korean women defectors; in particular, I apply hermeneutic phenomenology, as originating in the work of Martin Heidegger (2005 [1994], 2019 [1962]). Phenomenology is a research method that aims to understand the subjective perceptions and experiences of the individual by exploring a phenomenon from their own perspectives (Knaack, 1984; Welman and Kruger, 1999; Groenewald, 2004; Neubauer et al, 2019). Thus, it is efficacious when challenging normative suppositions, which are largely created by dominant social groups (Watson, 1976).

Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology as a critical social scientific research method, which disputed positivism. His transcendental phenomenology was established ‘not as a science of facts, but as a science of essential Being (as “eidetic” Science): a science which aims exclusively at establishing “knowledge of essences” ‘ (Husserl, 2012 [1931], p 3).